Occasional rantings about Dynamics CRM/365, Power BI, SharePoint, Office 365 and Azure cloud. Intrigued about how people collaborate and data driven decision making. Taking the first small steps in machine learning. Putting all of the above in practical use to help companies "embrace" their customers

When I started playing around with it I was surprised that it seemed to do things quite differently from Power BI for Office 365 since I thought it was simply the next release of the existing Power BI for Office 365 offering. Apparently this is not the case.

If you check out the official documentation Use Power BI with Microsoft Dynamics Online (Technet) – it seems to focus on the new Power BI Preview but the Microsoft Dynamics CRM templates for Power BI that you can download for free from PinPoint - listed in the second section of the page - seem to be based on Power BI for Office 365. (Use Google Chrome to see the download link – I did not see it when using Internet Explorer 11)

When you actually try to use it in practice together with Dynamics CRM Online you will however encounter some serious limitations which are hopefully resolved by the summer release:

At the moment it is not possible yet to pass in filters to the Power BI Dashboards which seems like an essential requirement for truly embedded analytics in Dynamics CRM using Power BI – you can however vote for this feature on the Microsoft Power BI Support site – Pass filters in URL.

To make matters even worse, it simply is not possible for the moment to embed Power BI Preview at all into Dynamics CRM – a feature which is available in Power BI for Office 365.

My guess is that the way forward will be Power BI Preview (or name it Power BI 2.0) and it will replace Power BI for Office 365 – you already see it appearing in the license management section of Office 365 (see screenshot below). But for the moment it is still a Preview and no specific release date has been made available so go for Power BI for Office 365 at the moment.